Million on day one for MGS4 quote incorrect, says Konami

Oh dear. Kojima Productions associate producer Ryan Payton has gone on the record and said that the widely reported quote attributed to him by Reuters journalist Kemp Powers (real name?) last year, which said that Konami needed to shift a million units of MGS4 on day one, isn’t correct.

The original piece said, “Payton said the new ‘Metal Gear Solid’ needs to sell over a million copies on the first day it goes on sale due to its costly production, but that may be a tough mark to hit given sluggish PS3 sales.”

Payton begs to differ. Speaking in this podcast, he said, “That million dollar figure is incorrect. I don’t even know how many figures we’d need to sell to be profitable. More importantly, that’s not something you really talk about in an interview. It’s nothing I’d ever say. It could’ve been something like, ‘You guys need to sell at least a million copies to be profitable, right?’ ‘Well, yeah, that sounds about right.’ Worldwide, obviously, right? I don’t think that’s too controversial, but it blew up. I’ve been trying to contact Kemp Powers over at Reuters to see, I don’t know if he recorded it on tape, but I’d love to hear it. So we can set the record straight.”

We’ve said it once, we’ll say it again. Learn how to say “off the record” very loudly when you’re speaking to mainstream journalists, naive development types. Thanks, Kotaku.